Functional diversity of soil microbial communities increases with ecosystem development
Tord Ranheim Sveen; Maria Viketoft; Jan Bengtsson; Joachim Strengbom; Justine Lejoly; Franz Buegger; Karin Pritsch; Joachim Fritscher · 2025 · Nature Communications
WASTE classifies this as Negative / Null Result Report · AI classification, approximate
The study found no significant effect — useful as a negative control or null benchmark for your own design.
Abstract
Land abandonment is the single largest process of land-use change in the Global North driving succession and afforestation at continental scales, but assessing its impacts on soil microbial communities remains a challenge. Here, we establish a nationwide successional gradient of paired grassland and forest sites to track developments in microbial structure and functioning following land abandonment and gradual land-use change to forests. We show that microbes generally respond through threshold dynamics, leading to increasing functional but decreasing taxonomic diversity. Succession also entai
Abstract by Tord Ranheim Sveen; Maria Viketoft; Jan Bengtsson; Joachim Strengbom; Justine Lejoly; Franz Buegger; Karin Pritsch; Joachim Fritscher, Nature Communications (2025) — licensed CC BY 4.0.
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Metadata source: OpenAlex · DOI 10.1038/s41467-025-66544-8